


Time Together

by KiyannaWhite



Category: Avengers, Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Smut, merfolk, mermaid - Freeform, mermaid au, merman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-15
Updated: 2014-02-15
Packaged: 2018-01-12 14:10:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1188159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KiyannaWhite/pseuds/KiyannaWhite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not long after Tony is kidnapped by the humans, he returns and begins making a suit of armor which he shows to Pepper on her half day off as an excuse to see her.  Though they're in a relationship, they're finding it's hard to break old habits and act like it, never spending real time with each other outside of their work schedules.  For a few minutes in the afternoon, they try and remedy that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time Together

Pepper lay on the sandy ground with her book.  It was the first time in over two weeks that she’d even had a half day off and this afternoon she planned to fully exploit it.  She had taken the book she’d been reading, an  old adventure novel about a fictional team of merfolk who had traveled across all three habitable oceans, to one of the farthest recesses of the beach she could find and settled down not far from the shore.  Here, she was even close enough to the surface to work on her tan and feel the waves pull her gently back and forth along the bottom.

Pepper been to most of the places described in the book, at least the modern day cities, through work.  With Tony Stark as her boss, she’d traveled along the coasts of most continents. As she read, she compared the descriptions of what the cities and peoples once were to how they’d been when she’d finally seen them, smiling when there was something she recognized, either an event or tradition, perhaps a fashion or building.  

A crab crawled up onto her tail and started to pick at her, making her turn around and glare at it.  “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?  Are you saying I’m messy?” she asked.  The crab, of course, ignored her, and continued as it had been, prodding along her tail and looking for something to eat there.  If she’d been younger, she’d have shooed him away, but from experience, she knew that agitating them meant she was more likely to get pricked.  Besides, there was no harm in getting cleaned up; she could fix whatever he did to her later.  Pepper was about to return to reading when she heard a familiar voice above her, a voice she’d been told she wasn’t going to have to deal with all afternoon.  

“Pepper, glad I found you.”  She looked up from her book to see Tony above her.  Well, there went her free half day she’d been looking forward to having.  

Trying to seem as little vexed as she could, she smiled up at Tony and closed her book, setting it under a rock so it wouldn’t blow away with the current.  “You were looking for me?” she asked, rolling onto her back so she didn’t have to crane her neck.  He was holding something red in his hand which she didn’t recognize.  “And what’s that?” she asked, pointing.  She was used to being left in the dark about a lot of his projects, but was, of course, always interested in them when he shared.  When he started looking for her on her days off with one of them in hand, odds were good he wanted to share it with her.  

He held it up and she could see it was a glove of some kind.  Metal, like the armors in some of the older wrecks.  Gauntlets, if her memory served her correctly.  “This,” he said, putting it on, and it was much larger than she’d originally thought once it expanded up his arm, “is the first piece of my latest project.”  He held it up to show her how it glistened down his arm like the shell of a red lobster.  

She sat up and pushed off of the sandy floor where she’d been laying in order to swim up to him and touch it curiously.  “Okay, you have a lobster arm now?”  She smiled, not quite understanding what the point was.  It wasn’t too different from armors knights had worn long ago.  Larger, perhaps.  Maybe it had something to do with his time on land where the land dwelling terrorists had tortured him and tried to get the oceans’ best scientist to build them weapons, but she made a point not to ask him about the time he’d spent away.  Prisoner in a bowl of water designed with guards at all times so that he couldn’t escape.  That’s what she understood of his time there, at least.

He shook his head. “No, not just lobster armor,” he explained, and brought up his arm, locking it, pointing it upwards.  “Let me show you, Pepper.”  He swam a few feet from her and took a more calibrated aim up and away from the coral she’d been basking in until he’d shown up.  She could see his fingers flex a certain way and a rather large bolt of electricity came out of the device with a loud zap.  Terrified, she froze for a moment, worried the electricity would conduct her way, wondering just how dangerous this device was.  

Of course, her worries went unfounded.  If his inventions hurt anyone, they tended to hurt he red merman himself.  Tony was pushed backwards into the water several meters, but otherwise looked none the worse for wear.  “Tony?” she asked with concern.  His company was based on weapons tech, but this was something new she’d ever seen before.  "What is this?  Why did you invent this?”  

But he just chuckled that dismissive laugh that made her worry as much as he hoped it would keep her from worry. "It’s just a pet project."  Of course it was a pet project.  Along with nearly everything he ended up turning over to the government once he was done and had no private use for it. It seemed Tony had a considerable knack for getting himself into all kinds of trouble no matter how you looked at it. Of course, he also was as stubborn as a manatee when it came to making him speak about it.

Pepper put her hand on his armored one and gave him a quirked look.  “You didn’t seek me out on my day off just to show me this.”  If he wasn’t going to say something about the glove, it was obvious he wanted her company.  At the start of their relationship, Pepper had tried to make it very clear that they would be purely working together.  As they’d become friends, that line only got sharper, spending no more time together than when they worked together.  These days, it was still hard to break that habit, to spend their time off together as well.  She pressed a kiss to his cheek, taking his ungloved hand.  “You could have come by if you wanted to see me.”    

He pulled her hand closer and returned the kiss.  “But I wanted to show off and have you tell me how clever I am.”  The lobster arm touched her side, whirring as it moved.  

There would likely be no satisfaction so great as to wipe the smug smirk off of Tony Starks face.  What a pompous ass. As if she didn't spend every waking moment with him and thinking about him already. "If you were anybody else..."  She kissed him, moving her hands to his shoulders, holding them together.  

“Oh, you’re happy I’m here.”  His lips strayed from hers, beginning to take little bits at her neck and shoulder, and his hands, both the metal and the flesh one found her waist.  

“Take off the glove.  I don’t want to get burned while your mind is elsewhere,” she said, hand going to his, squeezing the metal, though she knew he couldn’t feel through it.  The lobster hand let go of her and somewhere between bites and kisses she heard a something fall into the sand and his warm hand returned to her side, pulling her closer.  Gazing over his shoulder, Pepper looked along his tail, smiling at the way the current pushed the long, showy fins back and forth over the strong, slick muscles.  She kissed his neck again, gave his ear a live nip before swimming over his shoulder, wanting to touch it. Pepper kept her body contoured precisely to the merman’s, hands feeling and touching his chest and abdomen, her own tail feathering along him.  All along her body, Pepper felt him shudder and pinched his skin where it was still clearly skin, but littered with tiny red scales as well.  Taking a moment to drag her body over his shoulder, she felt him grab onto the end of her tail.  “Tony!”  One of her arms wrapped around his tail quickly so he couldn’t drag her back.  “Let go of me.”  

She felt herself being bent forward as he did, and met his eye as he smirked down at her.  “I saw what you did there.  Naughty girl.”  His hands released her, letting her swim free, running her hands along his tail, one in the front, one in the back, one playing with his long dorsal fin, the other, dipping into his slit for a second, making him jerk as she returned the smirk and then peek over his tail fin, pushing the almost see through scales out of the way.  

“You love it,” she stated, reaching back up to grab his hand and dragged her body along his until he wrapped his arm around her to kiss her again, fingers running down her necklaces, trailing along her breasts abdomen.  Pepper raised his clasper and gently, teasingly pivoted it, pushing it out, pressing it to her waist, leaning in for a kiss, and then pushed it back down to his side. Beneath her hand, she could feel him fighting her, the bony organ pressing against her, Tony trying to wrap himself around her, trying to mirror the way his arms were wrapping around her.   He pulled her close and returning her affection kiss for kiss, bite for bite.  “You’re such a tease, Pepp,” he stated as she pushed it back down against his side and tugged at his pelvic fin, then let the thin end trail through her fingers and behind her.

“Turn around,” he told her, and pulled her up a little higher, wrapping an arm around her waist. It had been a while, she knew, since they’d had the time.  One or both of them were always busy, or tired, or around the world doing something business related.  But she hadn’t realized exactly how bad it was until he pressed his fingers inside and started to brush out the eggs she’d accumulated.

Pepper squirmed at the sensitive  intrusion, tail responsively curling up and away from them and her gills flared.  “Mmm, eager,” Tony commented, and after a moment she realized he was making intentionally slow headway cleaning out the eggs.  Her gills were opening rapidly now; she couldn’t help how her touch starved body reacted to his hands.  “Hold still.”

Clusters of eggs like large, soft pearls fell to the sandy floor below as he brushed them out, and she could feel her pelvic fins opening, wanting his full contact.  “I think--you’ve got them all,” she said, words not wanting to readily come to her as her long fins made her every tremor and quake blatant.  

“Are you sure?  Maybe I’d better double check again.  Can’t be sure if you keep moving.”  There was a little too much glee in his voice to take him seriously, especially as she felt him grab hold of her lower tail, pressing his own gaping arousal to it.  

Held fast, Pepper gasped and strained against his slow, torturous touches.  “Yes, I’m sure, now get on with it.”  Reaching down, she started pushing against Tony’s shoulder, against his head, finally pulling out of his grip.  Free to turn around, the blue mermaid aligned her pelvic fins directly under his, then used her arms to guide a slow grind down and up his body to where their fins met again.

The merman’s fins splayed in the water, fluffing up against the current and making him look huge.  “You’re so much trouble.”  His strong claspers gripped her sides tightly, pulling her to him, causing them both to moan and she squirmed at the feeling of his cloaca against hers.  “Pepper…”  She could clearly hear the arousal in his voice, could see the flush skin and the way his gills were keeping pace even with hers.  

Pepper ran her hands up his back and through his hair, pulling him into a kiss as her tail instinctively curled around him, one side then the other, her murmured groans keeping pace with the way their tails moved against the other’s.  “Fuck, Tony.”  His hands still moved along her sides, squeezing her breasts and arms, tugging at her long coppery hair which she had tied up so that it trailed behind her like another fin.  “Feels good, hold me tighter,” Pepper demanded, grinding against him deliciously.  

The smirk in his groan of approval was clear as he pulled her closer, locking their bodies together.  Now positively gasping for oxygen, Pepper wrapped and rewrapped her body around Tony’s feeling herself reaching her distinctive end.  Finger scales grasped at and scraped the merman’s back, making the flush skin turn bright coral pink in long lines.  Tony’s grip tightened on her again telling her that he was getting close, too, just a few more curls.  The building tension inside her suddenly began to unravel, catching her by surprise.  Her cries grew louder even as frantic floundering grew more calm and when the moment passed she attended to the neglected task of breathing and catching her breath.

As she came down, the red and dark merman wrapped his arms around her chest, holding tightly as he flexed and rubbed against her, and finally a gush of liquid flowed between them into the water.

Through cracked eyes she saw that they’d ended up upside down and quite a ways away from where they’d left their things. Their grips on each other relaxed, and they began to sink back towards the bottom of the ocean.  Pepper watched with half an eye as he guided their decent to a sandy spot where they wouldn’t have to worry about the rough coral.  The two of them settled down on the sand, arms around each other, fins splaying back and forth as the waves far above them crashed against the beach, dark blue mixing with bright red.  Pepper reaches out, pulling Tony’s face down to hers for a kiss, her hands tracing against his warm skin, still bright pink in some places.  “That was really good,” she sighed, and molded her body to his.

Above them, the sun was a lot farther off than when she swam to the beach.  “I have to make more time for you. I promise.”  His hands brushed sand from her face and neck where it was starting to gather and she sighed into his touch.

Why was it that his words always felt like just words?  But she smiled at him and kissed him back and murmured affirmation.  “We should head back; it’s going to get dark and we have to find our things.” Whether she loved him or didn’t, he would always be Tony Stark and she would always just be Pepper Potts to him.  They might always have trouble allowing themselves to spend time together.  These moments, she hoped, made it worth it.


End file.
